A real invisibility cloak

Unlike previous such "cloaks", the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking. It's made from silicon.

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Acoustic Metamaterial

A group of researchers from Korea and China has created an acoustic metamaterial that causes the bizarre effect of a reverse Doppler effect. This is an important stepping stone to an acoustic cloak, according to the researchers.

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Quieting Sonic Booms

NASA is concluding a series of flight tests to measure shock waves generated by an F-15 jet, in an effort to validate computer models that could be used in designing quieter supersonic aircraft. The Lift and Nozzle Change Effects on Tail Shock, or Lancets, project aims to enable the development of commercial aircraft that can fly faster than the speed of sound without generating annoying sonic booms.

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Unraveling The Mystery Of Camouflage

Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), has spent 35 years studying animal camouflage, and in that time he has moved beyond awe at nature's disappearing tricks and discovered three broad classes of camouflage body patterns. He and his colleagues detail these three pattern classes, and how they achieve several mechanisms of visual deceit, in this week's issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The issue is entirely devoted to camouflage.

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Ending Static in Communications

"Cloaking technology could be used to make obstacles that impede communications signals 'disappear,'" said David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the study published in the journal Science.

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Cloaking objects at a distance

One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come up with a way round this using the remarkable idea of cloaking at a distance. This involves using a “complementary material” to hide an object outside it.

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